


i found it hard, it was hard to find

by theheartischill



Category: Jessica Jones (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 20:22:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17049947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theheartischill/pseuds/theheartischill
Summary: They’re not quite exes, and they’re more than exes, and last she heard they each have someone else now to wake up next to, but she wonders sometimes still about the version of herself who could have been someplace for him to return to.(Luke finds Jessica, after.)





	i found it hard, it was hard to find

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chelseagirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chelseagirl/gifts).



Luke finds her three weeks after her life combusts for—how many times has it been now? It’s not worth it to count.

Jessica’s three—maybe four—possibly six—deep when he slides onto the stool next to her, and her body recognizes his presence before she can name it. But it’s Luke: steady warmth, a stillness she remembers like a place from a dream. She doesn’t mean to ignore him—she owes him too much for that—but she waits for words to come and when none do she takes another drink.

“Aren’t you going to ask how I found you?” His voice, that low riverbed sound.

She snorts. “You found an alcoholic in a bar. Gee, I better watch my fucking client list.” She shifts, drawn toward and away from him in equal measure. “My office hasn’t moved.”

“I didn’t want to impose.”

She thinks about saying, _You’re imposing here._ She thinks about saying, _You could never impose._ She thinks about saying _I’m sorry._ She says, “Thanks, I guess.” And then: “This round’s on me.”

Luke orders a scotch on the rocks and it’s easier to breathe once both of them have something in their hands. Jessica looks at him, finally, and it’s not as bad as she feared. His gentle face, that smile like he isn’t afraid of her secrets. They’re not quite exes, and they’re more than exes, and last she heard they each have someone else now to wake up next to, but she wonders sometimes still about the version of herself who could have been someplace for him to return to. 

He says, “I saw the news.”

“Those wildfires in California, I know. It’s crazy.”

“Not that news.” 

“Oh,” she says. For this she looks him straight in the eye. “You mean the news about how my mother came back from the dead long enough for me to shoot her in the head. That news.”

To his credit, he doesn’t turn away. “Yeah,” he says, and there’s such real feeling in his voice she loses her own game and looks down. “I thought,” he continues, slowly, like he’s giving her a chance to stop him, “maybe it was time to follow my own advice. Try staying in touch.” 

She remembers—he fell asleep before her and she nestled herself onto his chest and listened to his heart, the slow wave of its beats like a subterranean sonar lighting up a map to a world she had never seen. And maybe that world never existed, or maybe it’s the territory she’s surveying inch by inch with Oscar, but there’s a space in her that will always know she glimpsed it first with Luke.

There’s no Miss Manners protocol for that.

But she could start by not punishing him for showing up for her.

“Well,” she says. “Things were shitty. Then they got worse. Now they’re great, you know, comparatively speaking, except for the part where—” And no matter how cleanly she tells herself the story of why it had to be done, she can’t get this part out without choking: that there were two people allowed to see her, and now they’re gone. “So. How’s life uptown?”

“Complicated,” he says. “Busy. I’m—working through some things.”

His sure hands and how they held her like she was nothing dangerous, the way he knows himself, believes in his place in the world. The thing she could least imagine understanding. He and Oscar aren’t much alike but they have this in common: their easy goodness, like a lighthouse. And she’s only ever known how to be the storm.

“Well,” she says, “you—” She hesitates, reminds herself that he’s giving her the chance to do what she said she wanted: not be alone. “Whatever it is, you’ll figure it out, I’m sure.” His sureness: that’s what she misses, when she misses whatever it was they had for a handful of hours between catastrophes. The idea that she could steal some of it for herself.

Luke looks rueful at that, and Jessica wishes she were a person who could erase that look. Sometimes Oscar smiles at her and she forgets to smile back because she’s so stunned she can still do that to people. Make them happy. The way she always could with—

But Jessica isn’t thinking about her.

“So,” she says. “How about them Yankees?”

He cocks an eyebrow at her. “You never struck me as a baseball fan.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” she deadpans. “But luckily for both of us I don’t feel like dragging out the bit. Just—” she waves her hands. “Trying to do my best impersonation of what a normal person might do in a conversation like this.”

“What did you talk about before...” He trails off, and she could offer a series of sarcastic finishes, but he didn’t need to come and she’s trying not to be alone.

She tries to reach back for some previous Jessica—not untouched by collapse, but not undone by it, either. “Mostly about how Kurt Cobain died because the world was too stupid to appreciate him.”

“Really?”

She laughs a little; it feels strange. “Yeah, actually. I was like obsessed with Nirvana, even though I was like eight when he died. You know, born in the wrong time, blah blah blah. I used the word poseur a lot. That’s poseur with a u.”

“You know,” he says, “somehow this doesn’t surprise me.”

“Yeah,” she agrees, “I’ve basically always been an asshole.”

“Not what I meant,” he says, but he’s smiling, and it’s—

—it hurts and maybe it’s always going to hurt to remember how she made Trish listen to _Nevermind_ for the first time, all those mix CDs she burned trying to get her into real music and Trish never really got it but she listened to every single one at an age where listening to every song someone played for you was as sure as saying _I love you,_ and it’s—

—nice, to talk about something that isn’t her miserable life or a client’s miserable life. It’s nice to feel like there’s someone else she can feel almost human around.

“So what about you,” she says, feeling rusty, trying to remember the last time she talked with someone like this, “what was your big high school obsession?”

“Baseball cards,” Luke says.

She laughs for real at that, because “ _What?_ ”

“Baseball cards,” he repeats. “I had a big-ass collection of baseball cards. In a binder. In several binders, actually.”

“Men are so fucking boring,” she says.

“Oh, I’m sorry we weren’t all original enough to be sad white girls crying about grunge. Let me guess, you wore a lot of black? Maybe some flannel, some Doc Martens?”

“I’ll have you know I was _very_ misunderstood.”

“I think I understand you just fine, Jessica Jones.”

And it’s so nice, to talk stupidly with someone kind, that she remembers again all the things she’s refusing to mourn and freezes, suddenly, words running dry.

“You okay?” Luke is looking at her with soft concern and she doesn’t want to see that so she looks away.

“I should head out,” she says, eyes on the stained and sticky bar. “It’s just about mistress o’clock for the guy I’m getting divorce leverage on this week.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to keep you.” He sits up straight, like he’s going to stand to walk her to the door, which is so fucking nice she almost can’t stand it.

“Luke,” she says, and regrets the taste of his name in her mouth. “You really didn’t have to—” She thinks, _didn’t have to come here._ She thinks, _didn’t have to care._ She thinks, _didn’t have to forgive me._

Jessica expects him to say that he knows, or that it’s no big deal. Instead he’s silent for a moment, and then: “I’m not doing you a favor.”

She swallows, shifts her chair. Drinks down the last watery whiskey in her glass. “What?”

He chucks her shoulder, gently. “You’re not the only one that could use a friend after the past couple years. And...” Deep breath, thoughtful face. They had, really, hours together, but she heard the sound of his breath in her sleep for months. The sound of what it might have felt like, to have a home. “I have enough grudges to carry. I don’t like what it does to me, all that—” He makes a slow, deliberate fist, and she knows. She knows this way they are alike. “So if there’s someone who…” He lays a hand over her wrist and her whole body tenses but she doesn’t pull away. “In the end, you were so much more to me than what you did. It hurt less to forgive you than to try to pretend that wasn’t true.”

She clenches her teeth and grips her glass and tries to keep it together because he has no way of knowing the gaping wound he’s speaking into. “Still a better person than me, I see.”

“I’m a better person than the person you think you are,” he says. “But so are you.”

She thinks about the person she could pretend to be in the time they had before she couldn’t pretend anymore. She thinks about how she still doesn’t know when something she’ll say about herself will make Oscar look suddenly uncomprehendingly sad. She thinks about Malcolm opening her blinds in the morning, about saying _I’m still not the hero you wanted me to be_ and Trish said—

“If I want to find you next time,” she says, feeling foolish and exposed, “where do I go?”

Luke smiles. “Isn’t it your job to figure out things like that?”

“Yeah, well, I don’t work for free.”

“Give me your phone,” he says, and she obliges. He puts his number in, sends himself a text, hands it back. “Now we can find each other. No emergencies needed.”

She puts the phone in her pocket, nods. “Yeah.” Forces herself to say, “I’d like that. A lot.”

Outside they walk to the corner and prepare to part ways and Luke says, “Anyone can see you’re carrying a lot, Jessica. Might want to think about letting some of it go.”

And maybe it’s just for one moment more than halfway to drunk where she feels infinitesimally less awful than she feels all the time, but she doesn’t cling tighter to the thousand iron brambles clouding up her lungs. She thinks about the place she glimpsed in the energy that flickered once between them: a place she was forgiven, a place she was released. A place she wasn’t alone. A place alive in her still, an opening of possibility that stayed when he was gone. What it was like, to be able to imagine herself transformed. She thinks, _you are always saving me._

“I’ll see you around,” she says. “Soon.”

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for chelseagirl, for Yuletide 2018. Title is Nirvana, obvs. I am on [tumblr](http://prettyboysdontlookatexplosions.tumblr.com).


End file.
